Stringer is a Hall of Famer, but her team’s average home attendance last season was 1,649. So she made $53 per attendee.

To get a sense of how fiscally disproportionate that is, consider this: At $53 per attendee, Kyle Flood would make $16.1 million and men’s hoops coach Eddie Jordan would pull in $4.7 million.

Both earned considerably less than Stringer’s $1.6 million in 2014.

For an athletic department that needed $36 million in outside help (student fees, government support, direct institutional support) to balance its budget last year, Stringer’s haul sticks out like a compound fracture.

It also makes for horrible optics that Stringer rolls in dough while men’s basketball, which actually has the potential to make money, withers on the vine of substandard facilities.

How did this happen?

After Stringer’s team made the Final Four in 2007, then-athletics director Bob Mulcahy gave away the store. The contract included a total of $676,000 in deferred compensation, set aside in increments by Rutgers over seven years and turned over to Stringer as a lump sum last June.

So Rutgers actually paid Stringer just under $1 million in 2014, but she collected $1.6 million of the university’s money.

That deal mercifully expired in 2014. Current athletics director Julie Hermann rightly negotiated an incentive-laced contract, with $700,000 in guaranteed compensation compared to $900,000 under the previous deal.

It’s the smart play, but there’s one weakness. If Stringer leads the Scarlet Knights to the Sweet 16 at any point over the next four seasons -- there’s a chance they could do it next month -- Rutgers is on the hook for a one-time bonus of $500,000, payable in five annual installments starting in 2018.

That is a big nut. There is intangible value, in terms of publicity and pride, to advancing in March. But half a million bucks’ worth? That’s national championship material, or Final Four at the very least.

We’ll see how it plays out. By then, maybe today’s sticker shock will have worn off.

Look, no one is questioning Stringer’s pedigree. She didn’t sneak into the Hall of Fame. But everything is relative, and in Rutgers athletics, where economic times are tough, $1.6 million doesn’t pass the eye test.